Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792), whose plays have been acclaimed as the prototype of the modern drama of Brecht and Durrenmatt, is a controversial figure who rose to prominence on the German literary scene in the early seventeen seventies. Among Lenz's theoretical writings is the influential essay "Anmerkungen ubers Theater," in which he introduces his innovative dramatic theories and describes the independent protagonists he envisions for the German stage. In the same essay, he demands "Zuwachs unsrer Existenz" (a heightened awareness of existence) from contemporary drama. However, in marked contrast to the "Anmerkungen," the protagonists of his two most prominent plays, Der Hofmeister (1774) and Die Soldaten (1776), are self-alienated, ontologically insecure individuals who seem victims of the socio-political realities of their times. Not surprisingly, critics are divided in their opinion as to what the contradictions in Lenz's oeuvre signify. Lenz was a student of Immanuel Kant's between 1768 and 1770, a time when the latter was formulating ideas that would find their full expression years later in his critical philosophy. In 1770, Kant presented his inaugural address "de mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis" (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World) to the assembled faculty and students of KCnigsberg Academy, among them J.M.R. Lenz. It is in the inaugural dissertation that Kant introduces his thesis of the individual as an inhabitant of two "worlds," the noumenal and the phenomenal, a central concept in his first critique, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, which would be published in 1781. This study examines Lenz's thoughts as they surface in his theoretical essays and his major plays and puts forward the thesis that it is Kant's division of the self into an intelligible and a sensible realm which prompts Lenz's call for "Zuwachs unsrer Existenz." Lenz's quest is fuelled, furthermore, by his acute awareness of the ontological insecurity of the individual self, an awareness which seems to anticipate the thought of Kierkegaard. The overriding purpose of this thesis is, through a reevaluation of Lenz's theoretical and dramatic works, to elucidate this eighteenth-century writer's quest for authentic being, a quest that he considered to be the individual's most urgent task. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

Time and place are the media through which the eternal is manifested for the comprehension of fallible man. It is the response to environment which has determined and shaped the human attitude toward ultimate mysteries. The patterns of nature are translated by the artist and philosopher into the ritual behaviour of man. The challenge of adversity and the joy of the morning or the new season are motivation for the restless desire to overcome the imperfections of human and geographical landscape. The Canadian prairie, virgin and elemental, as old as the world and as new as the twentieth century, determines a particular kind of response which is both immediate and universal. It provides the traditional challenge of the desert with the inherent possibility of a Promised Land for the regenerate. The writers who have translated the prairie experience into words have tended to fuse traditional with personal mythology, elevating the moment in mutable time to time eternal. The prairie, for them, is at once the desert of the Old Testament and the modern wasteland. The response, although archetypal, has relevance for the individual. The quest motif, which is an aspect of the romantic tradition of all cultures, is central to prairie fiction. The optimism of the journey toward the light is felt even in moments of darkness, during drought or a dust storm. There is a prevailing sense, in the Canadian prairie novel, that man, through regenerate behaviour, will overcome. As he wanders through the physical and metaphysical landscape of the prairie, the individual regenerate behaviour, will overcome. As he wanders through the physical and metaphysical landscape of the prairie, the individual learns to know God and to know himself. As environment takes on traditional aspects of Godhead, the fictional characters find their analogues in the Bible and in traditional mythological figures. The sick king, the fisherman, the god, the messiah and the prairie farmer become fused in the symbolic struggle for identity. The names of the original pioneers in the Old Testament are given new vitality by the particularly contemporary dilemmas of their modern namesakes. In the major fiction of the Canadian prairie, the quest takes on many aspects. Sometimes it is a direct search for transcendental reality, as in Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell, and sometimes it is an effort to find heaven on earth, outside of the spiritual context, as in Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel. Mitchell's journey after the meaning of God in Who Has Seen the Wind is primarily simplistic. He believes in the direct route. Reality is a means and not an impediment to supernatural revelation. For Sinclair Ross, whose characters in As For Me and My House are obsessed with transcendental reality, the quest is not so simple. Psychological realities distort divine ecstasy into grotesques. The Promised Land is circumscribed with irony. Margaret Laurence, who has rejected the vertical quest after God, is concerned with the voyage toward self knowledge. Her paths lead into the self. The individual is responsible for his own salvation. A tragic example of irresponsibility related to the horizontal quest motif is that of Abraham in Adele Wiseman's novel The Sacrifice. The questor is not always successful, but the knowledge he gains contains the promise of salvation. That promise is often realized in the messianic motif which is a corollary of the quest. Outsiders with the power to heal, like Gwendolyn MacEwen's magician and George Elliott's kissing man, have the traditional properties of the saviour. Their love embodies the promise of spring and the new season. The major and minor fiction of the prairie share a common vocabulary of optimism which is inherent in the quest literature of every tradition. Landscape is the objective correlative through which man learns by association about God and about himself. His struggle to comprehend particular environmental mysteries is analagous to the universal quest after truth. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation differs from previous research in that it suggests the continuity of Canadian poetry within a hypothesized four stages of development in North American poetry. The study is supported by a supplementary computer concordance to the major works of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, E.J. Pratt, Earle Birney and Margaret Avison. The continuity of Canadian poetry is indicated by a transference of poetic metaphor and world view from the works of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts (the 1880’s Group), to those of E.J. Pratt (the 1920's Group), and from Pratt to Earle Birney (the 1940’s Group). Stage One in the development of North American poetry emerges in relationship to the building up of community. Stage Two is characterized by a Romantic transcending of the land which overleaps evil; Stage Three by an acknowledgement of evil in man and nature and Stage Four by a concentrated inquiry into the evil of human nature in what might be described as the contemporary Black Romantic Movement. Chapter One, "The Forest and The Garden" chronicles the wilderness-garden antithesis in relationship to Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Heavysege and Isabella Valancy Crawford. The dominant world view of this group is that of "garden" as it relates to the cultivation of the forest, and the primary metaphors are from the vegetative world. Chapter Two, "The Dream World", describes the movement away from the dream as a metaphor of romantic transcendentalism in the works of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott. The "dream" in Roberts' canon emerges as a vehicle for transcendence which fuses Christian Romanticism and Darwinian progress; in the later works of Duncan Campbell Scott this transcendence is denied and evil is admitted, and the dream emerges in relationship to the temporal world. Chapter Three, "From Steel To Stone", indicates the transference of metaphor and world view from Roberts to Pratt in which the earlier poet's aspiring Darwinism is transformed into an atavistical structure which stresses the possibility of human Retrogression to the cave ethic, the steel to stone reversal. It is suggested that this atavistic reversal and the dominant metaphor of "blood" which characterize poetry written from 1920 to 1945 were occasioned by the carnage of two world wars. In E.J. Pratt's early work, the blood metaphor is associated with the bloodshed of war, and the "taint" or toxin of evil in the bloodstream which precipitates war. But it is also associated with a structure similar to Eliot's fertility cycle and the possibility of Christ-like redemption. In Pratt's later works, the blood metaphor moves directly into the Aryan myth and this also characterizes the writings of A.M. Klein. In F.R. Scott, Pratt's "taint" or "toxin", although carrying all of its previous escatological structure, becomes a real virus. Chapter Four, "The Fallen World", suggests that the concept of the Fall dominates poetry written in Canada from 1950 to 1965. Earle Birney is introduced as a transitional poet and it is suggested that his earlier poetry, which shows the influence of E.J. Pratt, moves from an Auden-inspired humanism, not unlike that of Scott and Pratt, to an ethos verging on the contemporary Black Romantic, which stresses the inversion of traditional Romantic myth and morality. Faced with the fallen world, the contemporary poet may decide to set up demons and assign to them a positive value (as Leonard Cohen and Daryl Hine do) or he may prefer to assign reality to the traditional God in relationship to the making of his own poetic world (as Margaret Avison does). The works of Avison and Cohen are examined in relationship to a world view which stresses the fallen world and the primary metaphors of sun-destructive and sun-creative. The Conclusion reviews the dominant metaphors and world views which have characterized Canadian poetry. It suggests that the development of poetry in Canada has been similar to the development of poetry in the United States in broad general terms although specific aspects of historical and geographical structure have changed some of the details of this development. It concludes that there is a continuity of Canadian poetry. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis will examine the works of six of the most outstanding French language writers of North Africa. The writings covered will encompass a period of some twenty years from the late nineteen thirties to 1962. Of the authors we have chosen to discuss four are Algerian: Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri and Yacine Kateb. Driss Chraibi is Moroccan and Albert Memmi a Tunisian of Jewish extraction. It will be seen that the twenty odd years with which this thesis -is concerned constituted, sociologically, an extremely difficult period for the people of the Magrab. It was the period of social evolution and political upheaval which so often goes hand in hand with a colony's quest for independence. This fact is constantly reflected in the works we discuss, and indeed, often tends to form the very foundation of the theme the author is developing. For the sake of clarity we have divided our study into four subdivisions. The first of these considers the problems imposed on Magrabians by North African traditionalism. An examination of Les Chemins qui montent, La Colline oubliée, Le Fils du Pauvre and Le Sommeil du Juste amongst others shows to what extent many of the customs peculiar to North African tradition restrict and hinder a people striving to adapt themselves to life in the twentieth century world. A chronic lack of schools, deeply rooted superstitions and any number of backward beliefs contributed to the general ignorance of the population. Social hierarchy and the introversion inherent to the various sections of society such as the village, the tribe and the clan tended to stifle any catalytic elements from the exterior. This tradition steeped way of life imposed serious limitations upon the youth of the period. Only the privileged few obtained an education, and even they were hard pressed, to put it to good use under the conditions of their own milieu. Chapter two is concerned with the confrontation of the two Magrabian societies, the North African and the French. It will be noted that the North African was often obliged by the European colonists to suffer considerable hardship. Many of the customs dear to him were abolished, and the public administration with its "Komisars" was anything but sympathetic toward the North African and his plight. .The uneducated natives naturally left themselves open to flagrant exploitation from which the colonists profited greatly. As for those Arabs who had managed to acquire an education, they were unable to take their rightful place in life as they were socially unacceptable to the French. Total integration was impossible under the circumstances. The North African Jew encountered even greater difficulties as he was often considered to be a quasi-outcast by his Arab compatriots as well as by the French colonists. Chapter three examines La Grande maison, Le Sommeil du juste and L'Opium et le baton and their theme of Magrabian nationalism. It will be seen that gradually the North Africans realize that they have a mother country. They feel the need for and hope for an improvement in their way of life. They desire an end to the poverty and backwardness which is so characteristic of their existence. The only solution appeared to them to lie in revolting against the colonial power which eventually led to the Algerian war of independence. The final chapter will show that the revolt and terrible war it caused was not a cure all for the ills that plagued the Magrab. Independence when it finally came was a disappointment. The transition from a colony to independent state had been too great and too hasty for the ignorant majority of the people. Independence had not brought about the desired reforms; on the contrary, the lot of many was worse than it had been under French domination. The leaders of the new country did not really have the interests of the people in mind, and social chaos resulted. In conclusion it will be noted that though the themes of the majority of the novels tend to be socio-political in nature, and thus largely appeal to a somewhat specialized segment of the reading public, some of them contain elements which may be said to be of universal interest. It will also be suggested that whether they may be of universal interest or not is really secondary to the fact that these novels represent the attempts of a society which, in a literary context at least, is in its infancy, and that universal or not they are representative of an entirely new literature, the literature of North Africa. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

Marguerite Duras' earlier works fit readily into the genre of the traditional novel and, like many early works of fiction, are often autobiographical in content. Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (l950), for example, tells the story of her difficult childhood in Indochina where she was raised by a widowed mother. However, with Moderato Cantabile (1958) her writing style changes markedly. The author associates this alteration in style with a crisis in her personal life whereby her writing becomes poetic and the narrative content increasingly abstruse. It is with the writer's experimentation in film during the sixties and seventies that a group of works, referred to in this paper as the "India Song" texts, appear. In this group of works, beginning with Le Ravissement de Loi V. Stein (1964), and ending with Aurélia Steiner, Aurélia Steiner, Aurélia Steiner (1979), the same story is told and retold, yet the form of the language, the narration, and the dominant mode of perception alters remarkably from text to text. These texts together are proposed, in this study, to form a unique self-portrait of the author. The thesis is divided into two parts. In Part I, the transition in writing style is considered as a movement away from an autobiographical mode into a self-portraiture mode. A comparison is made between the characteristics of her writing style in the texts following Moderato Cantabile and the characteristics of the self-portrait as outlined by Michel Beaujour in Miroirs d'encre. To elucidate the situation of the Durassian heroine prior to the self-portrait revealed in the "India Song" texts, the myth of Narcissus and Echo is utilized. This use of myth provides a background Gestalt against which the patterns within the fiction begin to appear. Part II is a textual analysis of the "India Song" self-portrait works which include Le Ravissement de Loi V. Stein, Le Vice-Consul, L'Amour, La Femme du Gange, India Song, and Aurelia Steiner, Aurelia Steiner, Aurélia Steiner. The ancient Summarian myth of female initiation, the myth of Inanna, when applied to these texts, discloses the transformation in perspective underlying the arcane surface patterns in which the same "story" reappears from text to text. From a one-dimensional world dominated by the masculine "regard", the reader is pulled, via the auditory, into a multidimensional kinaesthetic feminine world of the "lower" senses that is referred to in the analysis as "l'écoute". It is this perspective that the female writing voice of Aurelia Steiner, culmination of this unusual self-portrait, offers to the reader. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

This study evaluated moral dilemmas and Lawrence Kohlberg's (1975) stages of moral reasoning of protagonists in a sample of children's translated European war novels. The sample, consisting of fourteen books, was defined as all children's European war novels published between 1950 and 1984. The content analysis first determined the moral dilemmas in each of the novels by identifying those story situations where two or more moral issues were in conflict. A second procedure evaluated the protagonists' response to the dilemma, making possible the assignment of a Kohlberg level and stage of moral judgement. The collected data were evaluated following two steps. First, the Issues, Levels and Stages were quantitatively analyzed for representation, number, and frequency. In addition, the Issues and Stages were evaluated for those moral issues most frequently paired with each moral stage. The second procedure examined the relationship between the data and selected variables: Era (Era I 1952-1962, Era II 1963-1973, Era III 1974-1984), Sex of author and Sex of protagonist. The findings revealed that moral dilemmas in the European war novels were most often related to issues of Affiliation Roles, Morality and Mores, and Truth. No dilemma situations arose out of conflicts of the moral issues of Sex or Law. All other Kohlberg moral issues were represented at least once in the sample. The predominant stage of moral reasoning in the sample was Stage 2 (serving one's own needs), closely followed by Stage 1 (blind obedience to authority) and Stage 3 (playing the good role). Significantly, these stages reflect the general moral reasoning capabilities of the intended reading audience, ages 8 12 years. While higher stages were represented, they accounted for substantially fewer protagonist resolutions to dilemma situations. With regard to sex of the protagonist, the findings revealed that male characters more frequently resolved their dilemma situations with sophisticated levels of moral reasoning than did female, a factor which may be linked to the type of story. The relationships between moral development and Era appeared to reflect the transition from traditional realism to modern realism in children's fiction. Books written in Era I (1952-1962) contained few or no moral dilemmas. As with other traditional realistic fiction, child protagonists in that era were insulated from the world around them and thus remained relatively unaffected by World War II. Books written in Era II (1963-1973) and Era III (1974-1984), however, showed evidence of portraying children in the modern mode of realism. Unlike Era I, protagonists of these periods encountered large numbers of moral dilemmas and were highly involved in and affected by the war. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis is a study of the reception by critics in Canada of Anne Hébert's novels. We base our investigation of the critical texts upon the reader reception theory as articulated by Hans Robert Jauss, member of the "School of Constance" in Germany. Jauss explains the process by which a literary work acquires meaning as a fusion of two horizons. The first horizon is that which the reader brings to his reception of the work and contains all of his cultural, political and social attitudes as well as all of his previous experiences remembered either consciously or unconsciously. The second horizon is set up by the literary text itself and guides the reader's attention in certain directions in order to establish expectations and to evoke memories of past reading or experiences, and then sustains breaks, alters or reorients these expectations. Our thesis undertakes a definition and an explanation of the first horizon as pertaining to the reception of Anne Hébert's novels. From our analysis of these critical texts we find that critics from certain periods favour particular types of analysis which lead them to bring out of Anne Hébert's novels specific aspects related to these approaches. The approaches were, in their turn, influenced and even determined by the horizon of expectation of the critic, product of his time and environment. We find that the first type of criticism of Anne Hébert's novels is hermeneutic, favouring the analysis of themes. Through the 1960's and 1970's this criticism takes the form of several approaches such as the psychoanalysis of literature and the study of symbolism among others. However, these critics interpret Anne Hébert's works according to their pertinence to the Québec experience, whether it be in its psychological, religious, social, symbolic or even mythological implications. At a time when Québec society is undergoing a quest for a new collective identity, facing the transformation of a traditional society dominated by the jansenist messianic myth into a modern society, the literary community looks to Québec's contemporary writers to give direction in this process of transformation. Therefore, literature is seen as being subversive of the old order and defining a new collective identity for the Québec people. This is what the critics of this era expect to read about and so it is for this that they search in Anne Hébert's novels. During the early 1980's, the literary community undergoes a transition, perhaps due to the resolution of the independance issue in the 1980 Referendum. The new movement is internationalist, and Canadian critics follow suit by adopting the formalist approaches of literary criticism in vogue in Europe and the United States, and assign Anne Hébert a place in international literary currents such as postmodernism. These critics still see thematic importance in Anne Hébert's work, but as it pertains to man's universal experience rather than only to the Québec situation. The evolution in the works of Anne Hébert is certainly the other principal cause of this changing interpretation. We study the reorientation in the critics' horizon of expectation and leave to future undertakings the investigation of the role played by the original texts in this transition. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

The present thesis is an investigation into the musical rhetoric of Protestant funeral music in seventeenth-century Germany. The study begins with an exposition on the present state of musicological inquiry into occasional music in the Baroque, focusing primarily on ad hoc funeral music. Because funeral music is not discussed in any of the basic music reference works, a cursory overview of existing critical studies is included. The survey of this literature is followed by a brief discussion of methodological obstacles and procedure with regard to the present study. Chapter Two comprises a general discussion of Protestant funeral liturgy in Baroque Germany. Although numerous examples of the Divine Service in the Lutheran Church have survived the seventeenth century, not a single order of service for the funeral liturgy from the period seems to exist. This chapter provides both the social and extra-liturgical background for the music as well as a plausible Lutheran funerary liturgy based on documents from the period and modern studies. Prosopopoeia, the rhetorical personification of the dead, is the subject of Chapter Three. After examining the theoretical background of this rhetorical device, from Roman Antiquity to the German Baroque, the trope is examined in the context of funerary sermonic oratory. The discussion of oratorical rhetoric is followed by an investigation into the musical application of the concept of prosopopoeia in various styles of funerary composition, from simple cantional-style works to compositions in which the personified deceased assumes certain physical dimensions. Chapter Four includes an examination of various other musical-rhetorical figures effectively employed in funeral music. Also treated in this chapter are musica1-rhetorical aspects of duple and triple metre, where triple metre in particular, depending on the text, can be understood figuratively, metaphorically or as a combination of both. As this chapter makes clear, owing to the perceived antithetical properties of metre and certain figures, musical rhetoric was often used to illustrate the distinction between this world and the next. / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate

Chen Jo-hsi's two anthologies, Yin Xianzhanq (Mayor Yin) and Lao ren (Old Man) and her novel, Gui (Repatriates) depicts social and political conditions in China during the Cultural Revolution. Chen shows the effect of Cultural Revolutionary turbulence on the individual by focusing on his experience of loss. This study examines Chen's use of irony, imagery and psychological profile to portray the various forms of emotional, spiritual and physical losses sustained by her protagonists. Chen's fiction also reflects her seven year sojourn In China during which she experienced disillusionment and a loss of faith in the Marxist dream. Based on Peter Marris' model on loss and grief as outlined in Loss and Change, Chen's work can be seen as a literary catharsis for the tension that arises from her experience of loss and her subsequent resolution of grief. Marris' theory posits that an individual successfully resolves his grief when he is able to abstract meaning from the lost relationship and reformulate it in terms of his changed circumstances. This grieving process helps to explain a change in Chen's fiction from social commentary to political polemic and a corresponding decline in literary quality. In Mayor Yin she is content to merely document the losses sustained by her protagonists stemming from the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. Essentially, her, fiction at this stage shows her attempt to record and validate her China experience. Her restrained tone and skillful use of structural and situational irony, nature Imagery and psychological portraiture to portray her protagonist's response to loss distinguishes this anthology from Old Man and Repatriates. As Chen's purpose of serving China is reformulated, her didactic style undermines the artistic integrity of her fiction. In Old Man Chen's compulsion to protest leads to intrusive commentary and manipulation of plot and character. Repatr iates which is an autobiographical document of Chen's journey towards the resolution of her loss also shows the effects of her renewed purpose. She resorts to using her fiction as a platform to protest against political oppression of the individual and to support basic human rights for the Chinese. / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate

This thesis is an in-depth analysis of three later short stories "Lust and Restrictions" (Characters Omitted),"Flowers and Pistils Floating on the Waves" (Characters Omitted), and "Happy Reunion" (Characters Omitted), written by the 1921 Shanghai born Chinese author Zhang Ailing. The analysis takes a look at the structure of these short stories and discovers that they differ from her earlier short stories, that is those she wrote ten years earlier in the 1940s, in their structural and narrative approach and thereby place a greater demand upon the reader's participation. These three stories are the only short stories by Zhang Ailing that do not develop in a linear fashion. The author introduces them in the preface of the anthology Sense of Loss by calling the second story "Flowers and Pistils Floating on the Waves" an "experiment." Because of their similar structural and narrative approach, I called all three of them "experimental" which really means the same as "modernists", to distinguish them from her earlier linear stories. The three major characteristics of the experimental stories, that is—the narrative happening in the character's minds, the chronological distortion of the narrative and the almost invisibility of a narrator large subordinated to the character's presence—all have the effect of bringing the reader close to the characters' subjective thoughts and reflect the characters' state of mind in the stories' present time, depending on the frequency of the switches between the times, that is between the past happening in the characters' minds and the stories present time. The reader's participation in these three stories is largely due to the narrative structure while in some of Zhang Ailing's lienar stories, as examined in this paper, it is based on the stories' content. The political changes in China, and the author's move away from the mainland could account for her increasingly pessimistic outlook on life reflected in the disjointed structures of the "experimental" stories. / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate